Chapter 32 - Making Art

Nate couldn’t suppress the smile that lit up his face as they set up an easel near the window. With the blinds drawn back and the sun beaming in it gave the perfect light for his art. The two workers who’d been carrying things up to his suite at the inn had already stacked a number of canvases against the wall. He also had a full set of what, he hoped, were oil based paints, with paintbrushes, currently sitting on what he was mentally calling the coffee table. Everything he needed to paint.

His art had always been an outlet and he wasn’t some sort of machine that could just work, work, work without rest. So he had asked Valeria if she could procure everything he would need to paint. She’d blushed a bit at that and he wondered if he thought she was going to paint her. He might, if she asked. He’d done portraits before, though usually just with a pencil. This wouldn’t be his first time painting but it had been a while so he was going to start with something a little less detailed than a portrait, or even a person. He’d decided the first painting would be of his view when he was travelling between universes. The Space Between was his planned title for the piece.

But that was for when he needed to relax. After he’d put in the study time, developing his Skills. As the workers bid their farewells and exited, he returned to sitting by the window and pulled out a piece of wood he’d gotten from the leather satchel. The first thing he’d done upon returning was use Improve Material on one of the woodcarving knives, raising the blade to rare quality. The Skill hadn’t even emptied his Mana Reserve thankfully. Now he was ready to start testing.

He hastily carved a mana gathering rune. He used two sigils, the Gather Sigil, which was three concentric rings with a diamond in the centre, and the Mana Sigil, which looked like a sun during an eclipse. The geometric pattern for the rune was a single circle around the two sigils. It was a terrible job and the resulting notification showed it.

Congratulations on creating a Mana Gathering Rune (Initiate Quality).
Your achievement has been recorded.

Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.

The terrible work he’d done on the rune was intentional. He wanted to use his other Skills to try and isolate what was wrong, fix it, then improve the material further. Staring at the rune he flowed mana into his Runic Knowledge Skill in his Class Core, focusing on trying to understand the many flaws in his Mana Gathering work. Running through the issues in his head he tried to draw more on the Skill. He’d used two sigils of different quality. He’d never seen a sigil below Journeyman quality, but his Mana rune was Master quality. One of the ones he’d gotten while on Arikanvil’s research station.

Runic Knowledge didn’t react so that either wasn’t an issue, or his level in the Skill was too low. Moving on he focused on the shape surrounding the rune. A simple circle. Runic Knowledge activated and it was like he could see the dispersal pattern of the mana. It was wrong. Wrong for what he wanted to achieve. He could see that now. The Gather Sigil was simple but direct. He should surround it in Mana sigils. One at each point of the compass. Then the dispersion pattern should be like waves… so he should mirror the geometry of the Gather sigil…concentric circles moving inward, with a diamond at the centre, each of the four points touching one of the points of the compass.

It was finally time to flex his latest Skill. Using Runic Modification he spent the next thirty minutes making adjustments to the rune until it finally fit the image he had planned. The notification pinged in the corner of his vision.

Congratulations on creating a Mana Gathering Rune (Apprentice Quality).
Your achievement has been recorded.

Runic Knowledge 7 > 8
Runic Modification 1 > 3

Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.

Better. But it wasn’t quite where he wanted it. Going back to his examination he couldn’t find any flaws that Runic Knowledge would note in the rune itself. So he switched his focus to the material and immediately found the issue. The material was the problem, not the rune. Pushing his Improve Material Skill and utilising one of his mana gems from his spatial storage he was able to raise the material to Epic quality. That got him another notification.

Congratulations on creating a Mana Gathering Rune (Journeyman Quality).
Your achievement has been recorded.

Runic Knowledge 8 > 9
Improve Material 5 > 6

Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.

He’d done it and hopefully solved his first problem. Pulling out another piece of wood he used his Runic Replication Skill to create another Mana Gathering Rune onto it, before raising the wood's quality to epic. With his two Mana Gathering Runes ready he took all of his empty mana gems, which ended up totalling six gems, and placed them all into a bowl near the fireplace.

That was his first problem solved. He’d known he was going to burn through the mana in his mana gems making use of Improve Material, so he needed a way to efficiently refill the empty mana gems. He doubted they’d get as much mana as they could store in them but anything was better than nothing. The mana gems design was quite ingenious. They allowed mana in, meaning they could store whatever the density of mana was that was around them. However they wouldn’t let any mana back out, the runes inside, impossible so far for Nate to make out, linked to the Mana Flow rune on the outside. The only way to let mana back out of the gem was to activate the Mana Flow rune. So as long as he could create reasonably dense spaces of mana using his Mana Gathering rune, he could effectively recharge all his gems.

Now it was time to start studying his Improve Material skill. He’d seen growth in Skills before just by improving his understanding of them and so he spent the next hour slowly using Improve Material on different substrates. The wood, scales and leather all seemed to have similar reactions and he couldn’t feel any change in the texture of the materials. Nor did he notice an increase in weight, which might have indicated the Skill was somehow adding more material or increasing the density.

He didn’t raise anything above Rare quality, not wanting to burn through his remaining mana gems before he had a path forward. That led him to thinking about the impact more scientifically. What was the material in this case? It was matter. And what was matter? It was a conglomerate of molecules held together by various physical forces in some sort of lattice structure. The system notification that followed that thought let him know he was on the right track.

Improve Material 6 > 8

Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.

From there, it was easy to guess what Improve Material was doing. It improved the mana capacity of materials it was used on. How though? By altering the lattice structures of the underlying matter to be more geometric. That was how runes worked. Mana was drawn to geometrical shapes for some reason. One day he’d investigate if different shapes had better performance. But for now he was confident he was on the right track. Another notification told him that was the case.

Improve Material 8 > 10

Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.

So, the fact that the materials had other improvements, like being stronger, was just a side effect of the improved underlying structures of the material, plus the added effect of mana. What did that mean for improving his skill? Well, materials like the wood and scales weren’t made up of just one type of molecule. They were made up of many. Some of which were likely impurities within the material. So he could further improve the material if he could direct his Skill to remove impurities, if it wasn’t already.

That was enough to push the level of the Skill. But it wasn’t enough to evolve the Skill up a tier. He’d just be optimising the current usage of the Skill. Which meant he needed a way to push its boundaries. That had brought him back to his study earlier that day and his ensuing experience in the market square. The most expensive material he’d purchased had been the scale from what the seller claimed was a Razorlash. Entirely possible he managed to purchase some from the Guild. But the reason it was the most expensive? Because Razorlash scales had an affinity for shadow mana. Or at least, so the seller explained. He already knew it was possible for mana to have affinities. Kiri and he had spoken about it a little, and then there was the discussion with Frick, and the Class options that had specified an affinity. What did that mean though, when it came to a material?

It sounded like it meant that the material could either aspect mana to a particular type, like shadow in the case of the scale, or that Skills or Spells used through the material of the same type might have greater effects. And that was where his opportunity to develop his Skill came in. What if he could use Improve Material to try and apply an affinity to a material? His Runic Intent was the obvious vehicle for trying and with a path forward he got to work.

The rest of the day flew by, his lunch and dinner delivered by the inn staff as he worked on his Improve Material Skill. When the frustration of making no progress, and there was a lot of frustration, got to him, he distracted himself with his art, painting some of the pieces he had promised to himself he would. As he went to bed that night his last thought was, tomorrow is another day.

*************

Another day turned into two. Then four. Then eight. Then sixteen. Kiri, true to her word, had given him as many days off as they spent on tasks. After the goblin task, they’d stuck purely to collection jobs from the Adventurer’s Guild. That wasn’t to say that trouble didn’t find them. Every visit to the forest ended with them being attacked, or in one instance being the aggressor. It got to the point where Nate had asked Kiri about it, only to be informed that the herbs that they were seeking generally had an affinity, and animals hoarded such resources as by feeding on them, they could improve their own affinities.

They had luckily found a single Orb from one of the beasts but Nate had pushed for Kiri to use it herself as it boosted her strength by one, a Stat he didn’t see himself needing. She’d promised the next one to him before she had agreed to use it. One time they had camped for the night out in the woods as the herb they’d been seeking - a beautiful red and yellow streaked grass called ‘sunset bittercress’ - was only visible during sunset, the rest of the time appearing green or blue like the grass of the forest.

Every day he was learning something new, pushing his Skills to new heights, working on new Runes, but still he couldn’t get Improve Material to add a concept. He’d already tried using his Runic Intent to see if he could apply an affinity to the material. That had wasted two days. Then he’d tried to see if he could use the Skill while he held a material with an affinity near it and use his mana to merge the affinity of one into the other. He’d used his Razorlash scale of course. That hadn’t worked either. Another three days gone. He’d carved the sigils for the elements he knew into the wood and leather before using Improve Material. Still nothing. He’d spent three days trying different versions and it had all amounted to nothing.

That wasn’t precisely true. It was just how he was feeling. He was just following the scientific procedure. Make a hypothesis; test it; determine results; make a new hypothesis. Or at least as much as you could apply science to magic.

Now leaning back in his chair, he surveyed his latest failure. A piece of wood with the sigil for ‘wood’ carved into it. Still no detectable affinity. He was convinced now that he needed a new approach. If he couldn’t even impart the affinity for wood into, well, a piece of wood, via this method, then it was a dead end.

Frick hovered nearby watching, the Familiar’s floppy blue ears hanging down as he watched Nate stand up and walk away from the coffee table in his room, which had become his impromptu work table. It had taken Nate a few days to settle down after their talk about the Spirit’s deception. Slowly they’d gone back to something like normalcy but they weren’t as close as they had been and Nate still wasn’t ready to fully trust his Familiar again. Frick had been nothing but helpful since then, dialling back his normal antics in what Nate assumed was an attempted apology.

“Come on, boss man. You knew it wouldn’t be that easy to get a skill to mythic rarity, don’t give up.”

“I’m not giving up, Frick. I am just thinking. It’s easier for me when I’m walking,” he said, pacing back and forth. Even Valeria had commented on it, asking if everything was okay.

A glance at his status showed him all the progress he had made on his Skills over the last sixteen days.

Though he’d mostly focused on trying to alter his Improve Material Skill, he hadn’t neglected his others. He’d wondered if his Skill progression was a bit fast but Frick had assured him most Skills were like that pre-evolution. Every evolution slowed the speed at which Skills developed. Something about increasing complexity. Using Identification while out on jobs had pushed it close to evolving and Nate was considering if there was a particular direction he wanted to force it. He’d also used the new Sigils he had learned to develop a few new Runes and carved them into wood. They sat in his spatial storage and their development had pushed his Runic Knowledge and Runic Modification Skills. Runic Replication was lagging as he didn’t have much need to use it so far and was at a loss for how to develop it. Runic Intent had been pushed purely through his work with Improve Material.

But it was his last Skill that made him the happiest. The System had acknowledged his skill at painting and awarded him the Skill after he finished his first piece, which was sitting in his spatial storage. He wasn’t ready to show that one off. The second one however was still sitting on his easel, in all its glory. He was going to show it to Kiri on their next job as she’d been begging to see one of his works ever since she’d found out that he had started painting. The thought made him smile.

Nate looked out the window, seeing the sun set over the buildings of Helmfirth. He’d been here now for over two weeks. That was another thing he’d learned. A week was seven days here, the same as on Earth. It was oddly convenient but seeing as how they also seemed to follow the whole cycle of working six days and resting on the seventh, maybe it was just a fairly common way of organising time in medieval society. In the end he didn’t care enough to further look into it.

He’d come to find he liked it here in Helmfirth. He still missed his friends, but it was hard to compare the life he had lived on Earth with what he had here. He lived in a luxurious suite that was barely putting a dent in his wealth, spending his days either exploring the nature of magic and mana, or walking through beautiful forests with a girl who had quickly become his best friend. He could recognise that now. Kiri was his best friend, in a way that even Michael had never been. That wasn’t to say that Michael had been somehow inferior… that was the problem. He’d always felt inferior to Michael. Like a charity case. He knew, deep down, that those feelings were purely due to his own inadequacies as he saw them.

That was part of the magic of this new world. He didn’t feel inferior here. He was slowly working through his problems, but when he worked with Kiri, he felt like they were partners. Equals. The thought made him smile. He’d made up his mind to be honest with her about his Class and where he came from. He knew it was a risk and that it might put him in danger. Her as well, so he’d of course give her the choice of whether she wanted to hear it. But he couldn’t live a life of paranoia and loneliness. He wanted his best friend to know the truth. With that thought in his mind, he exited his room to go eat downstairs in the common room. A chance to enjoy the music and relax. Glancing back at the coffee table, and his latest attempt he smiled slightly. Tomorrow was another day.